The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore

...this history of ideas about life and death underscores the eternal verities: We know everything. We know nothing. We learn. We forget. In this game of life, we go on to roll the dice once more.
-NY Times

Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave.

How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That's why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg and ends it with an American who, in the 1970s, began freezing the dead. In between, life got longer, the stages of life multiplied, and matters of life and death moved from the library to the laboratory, from the humanities to the sciences. Lately, debates about life and death have determined the course of American politics. Each of these debates has a history. Investigating the surprising origins of the stuff of everyday life—from board games to breast pumps—Lepore argues that the age of discovery, Darwin, and the Space Age turned ideas about life on earth topsy-turvy. “New worlds were found,” she writes, and “old paradises were lost.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful, learned, and altogether beguiling.

The Washington Post

Reviewed by Rachel Newcomb
on
Jul 07 2012

...she manages to spin a larger narrative that both fascinates and informs, showing that our taken-for-granted ideas about every stage of life are culturally specific, very much a product of our times.

The Boston Globe

Reviewed by Buzzy Jackson
on
Jun 03 2012

Everything changes. And although, as Lepore writes, “it’s best to have a plan,” as her multifaceted, sometimes dizzying joyride of a book reveals, the next roll of the dice could, in fact, change everything.

The Daily Beast

Reviewed by Malcolm Jones
on
Jun 21 2012

...to be entertained, educated, and given several helpful new ways to think about the stages of life and what lies beyond—and anyone familiar with Lepore’s work knows what a sure bet that is—you’re in for a good time.

The Millions

Reviewed by AUSTEN ROSENFELD
on
Jun 21 2012

...well-researched and emotionally intelligent new book The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, discusses how people relate to life and death, and how those relations have morphed throughout history.